Alien Taste by Wen Spencer Page A

asked, pulling out a PDA to take notes.
    â€œThat piece of carpet.” It was a two- by three-foot carpet sample used to catch dirt at the front entrance. It was stained a rust color by blood. “It had been under the one girl when I first arrived. It’s over there beside the stairs now.”
    He tilted his head sniffing, suddenly aware of a draft and a familiar smell.
    â€œWhat is it?” Max asked.
    He stepped inside and swung the door shut. Behind it was an obvious basement door. He cracked it slightly and the strong odor of animal musk swept up from the basement.
    â€œYou weren’t in the basement,” Agent Zheng commented behind him.
    Ukiah glanced back at her. “They kept mink in the basement?”
    â€œFerrets.” Agent Zheng scrolled her PDA file backward and read. “There were three ferrets found in cages in the basement, one male and two females. According to friends, they belong to Janet Haze, and normally she kept them in the attic with her. A day prior to the murders, she asked her roommates if she could move them to the basement, complaining that they made too much noise. The ferrets were removed the evening of the murders by the Allegheny Animal Control Department and taken to the humane shelter on the North Side.”
    â€œAnd they’re still there?” Max tried to sound casual while he gave Ukiah “the look.”
    â€œI checked on them yesterday afternoon,” Agent Zheng admitted.
    Ukiah shut the door uneasily. “Too much noise? She seemed really bothered by noise.”
    Agent Zheng nodded. “It’s been found that in psychotic individuals there is an inability to filter out background noise. It’s theorized that it’s a chemical imbalance that literally drives the person insane by overloading their senses. In your recording, Janet Haze repeatedly asked you how one stopped listening.”
    Max caught his eyes and shook his head, as if warning Ukiah not to say anything.
    Haze had been asking the wrong person, Ukiah thought instead of saying. When they had first started working together, Max asked him often if he was listening. It had puzzled Ukiah since he didn’t go around with his fingers jammed into his ears. Slowly he had learned that other people couldn’t recall things they hadn’t paid attention to, while Max had learned that Ukiah always listened.
    Ukiah glanced about the entry hall. Other than the basement, there was the living room and the stairs leading out of the hall. “Where first?”
    Agent Zheng indicated upstairs. “Since the bodies were on the first floor, it’s the most disturbed. It probably would be best if you start with her room.”
    Ukiah started up the steps and had almost reached the top when a thought hit him. Why did Agent Zheng check on the ferrets yesterday afternoon?
    He paused at the top of the steps and watched Agent Zheng follow him up. Should he ask her? What would he say if she asked why he was so interested in the ferrets? If Janet Haze’s ferrets were still at the humane society, then they weren’t the ferrets at the morgue. Assuming, of course, they hadn’t broken out, had a midnight feeding frenzy, and returnedto their cages to look innocent. Unlikely, but so far everything about the morgue was unlikely.
    Â 
    The window to Janet’s room was shut, and otherwise at first the room seemed unchanged. He stood at the center of the room and did a slow scan. To her credit, Agent Zheng stood patiently at the steps, without a hint of growing impatient. Max pulled out a cigar and chewed on its unlit end.
    When Ukiah found the first missing item, Max caught the change in Ukiah’s expression. “Found something?”
    Ukiah stepped forward to tap a crowded bookshelf. “There was a bottle between these two books, shoved the whole way back to the back wall. It was one of those small drug bottles. It had a label with the word